He looked at the brokenhearted boy, then at Tochee. The big alien didn’t have body language the way humans did, but something in its still posture was universal. Their friend was as dejected and worried as he was.

“Now what?” Orion asked.

Ozzie wished he could find an answer.

Ten hours after the flock had vanished into the blue haze of the atmosphere Ozzie knew he was going to have to do something about getting them to one of the particles floating in the gas halo, even if it was only one of the hefty sponge trees. Orion had withdrawn into a massive sulk, although Ozzie knew damn well that was just a cloak for the boy’s anxiety. Tochee, though, remained his main cause for concern. The alien was in noticeably poor physical shape, with the color leeching out of its furry fronds, while the manipulator flesh along its flanks twitched constantly. Freefall really didn’t agree with the big creature. Ozzie knew it hadn’t eaten for over a day, and he was still pleading for it to drink something.

He allowed himself to drift away from the decking, and began scanning around for any large object. He’d had a few ideas about altering their course by a couple of degrees; he was actually keen to see if they worked in practice. Mainly it involved trailing the sail on the end of a rope, and using it like a very flexible rudder, with himself out there keeping it oriented in the right direction. The conditions were just about right, a gentle constant breeze that shouldn’t present too much trouble keeping the sail pointing correctly.

“What are you looking for?” Orion asked; he sounded very tired.

“Anything that’s out there, dude. We need to start making some progress.”

“Do you think we can?”

The hopelessness in the boy’s voice made Ozzie tug on his safety robe and drift back down to the ramshackle raft. “Hey, course we can. We just need some fresh resources, is all. This falling off the end of the world thing kinda caught us by surprise, huh?”

Orion nodded sheepishly.

“The trees will have plenty of water. And they probably have eatable fruit. We can use the leaves and wood to turn the old Pathfinder into something that can fly a lot better. Trust me. I’ve been in worse situations than this.”

The boy gave him a surprised look, then slowly smiled. “No you haven’t!”

“Don’t you believe it. I was on Akreos when its sun went into its cold expansion phase. Nobody had ever seen anything like that before. None of the astronomers had a clue what was going on. Man, that planet’s climate went downhill so fast it was amazing. It was like living inside an old Hollywood disaster movie. I’d got a family there, married some English girl called Annabelle; she was the same kind of age as me, or maybe older, rejuved a couple of times, of course. She was famous back on Earth even before I was. Can’t remember what for, must have dumped that memory. Real pretty, though, with a hell of a figure. You’d have loved her.

“We’d settled a long way from the capital city, doing the whole basic rural idyll scene in some beautiful countryside right between the temperate and subtropical bands, so it was seriously hot in summer but we still had snow in the winter. I built us a villa at the head of a low valley, and we’d got ourselves a nice little farm going. Course, it was all automated, had to be, we spent most of our time humping like we were training for the Olympics. Wow, yeah.” He chuckled at the memory. “That was one of my lives where I’d got myself a little bit of a boost where it matters most to a guy, you know. Not that I need much of a boost, but hey.”

“Ozzie.”

“Right. Yeah. We’d been out there in the wild a couple of years, had one kid with another on the way, when the lights went out. Goddamn weirdest thing I have ever seen. The sun turned orange inside of a week. Its photosphere deflated, too; you could watch the damn thing shrinking. They worked it out eventually, something to do with unstable hydrogen layers. The sun rotated a lot faster than normal, see, which messed with the internal convection currents. There were upwellings of helium and carbon into the fusion level. I think that was it. Anyway…Akreos turned cold fast.”

“Ozzie.”

“Don’t interrupt, man. The snowstorms just like exploded out of the sky. They went on forever and a day and weren’t ever going to stop. And it was cold, I mean not quite as bad as the Ice Citadel planet, admittedly, but ball-bustingly cold for an H-congruous planet, let me tell you. So cold all the train lines turned brittle and fractured. Aircraft couldn’t fly in the blizzards, of course. And there wasn’t a snowplow built that could keep the roads open in those conditions.

“We had to evacuate. There were already over five million people on that poor doomed planet, and virtually no transport left. The Commonwealth Council imported snowmobiles from all the Big15, but they concentrated on the capital city and the major towns. Annabelle and I were all on our own. So I had to break down all the farm machinery and rebuild it. You know what as? A fucking hovercraft, man! Can you believe that; it’s like twentieth-century technology. How crap is that? I mean, why not just straight out build yourself a rocketship? But it worked. We set off for the capital, but by then the glaciers were coming. Do you have any idea how fast they can move? Man, they’re juggernauts in the express lane. We were racing ahead of them in the hovercraft; these mile-high cliffs of ice that roared across the land crushing anything in their path and knocking mountains out of their way. Supplies were running low, and our power level was reaching critical—”

“Ozzie!” Orion pointed frantically.

“Huh?” Ozzie twisted around, his arms tightening his grip to prevent the movement becoming a spin. A jagged fragment of land was rising over the Pathfinder’s prow like a moon that was way too close. It filled a quarter of the sky. “Hoshit,” he squawked. His e-butler immediately began analyzing dimensions. The flat, elongated chunk of land was thirty-eight kilometers long, and nine wide at the center, with both ends tapering away to daggerlike spires. Its surface was mostly vegetation, a canopy of treetops with leaves whose shading ran from deep hazel through sickly brimstone and into a dense olive-green. Tight streams of swan-white mist slithered along the foliage with a sluggishness approximating thick liquid. The closest point of the alarmingly solid mass was seventeen kilometers away.

“Where the fuck did that come from?” Ozzie spluttered. Admittedly he hadn’t checked around much since the flock left, but this should surely have been visible from a long way off. He hadn’t been dozing that much.

“We are going to crash,” Tochee said.

Ozzie’s e-butler computed their closing velocity at just less than one meter per second. Purple vector lines sliced across his virtual vision. No doubt about it, they were on an interception course. “Bump,” Ozzie corrected. “Not crash: bump. This is freefall, remember. And at this rate we’ve got another five hours to go. We’ll be quite safe.”

“They did it!” Orion exclaimed jubilantly. “The Silfen saw us, and steered us here. I knew they were our friends.”

Ozzie wanted to tell the boy how unlikely that was; but then the gas halo wasn’t exactly a natural artifact. “Could be. Okay, guys, let’s work out how we’re going to lasso ourselves onto the surface when we approach.”

Twenty minutes away from what they now called Island Two, a gentle wind was providing the Pathfinder a lazy, slightly erratic tumble, which made it difficult to know exactly which way up it would be when they finally hit. Bumped! Ozzie was planning on jettisoning the sail when they were keel-on and only a few minutes away from contact. That ought to slow their breeze-augmented rotation; although he wasn’t sure if the figure-skating principle might not apply here, and pulling the mass in toward the center would actually help increase the spin. In any case, they all thought it would be best if they jumped just before the raft reached the treetops.